LCBO investigating cybersecurity incident, stores not affected

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) continues investigating a “cybersecurity incident” that has knocked out its website and mobile app since Tuesday.

Late on Tuesday night, a spokesperson said the LCBO was looking into the matter, noting that the website and mobile app would be unavailable until further notice.

Any user that visits the LCBO website will be prompted by a “service unavailable” alert message. The in-store shopping experience is unaffected, the LCBO confirmed.

In an update on Wednesday, the LCBO said it was still investigating the cause of the cybersecurity event. It did not provide an exact timeline for when customers could expect a return to service.

This follows an unrelated outage that affected SickKids hospital in Toronto, relating to problems with the connectivity of the various hospital network’s digital systems that exchange information.

On Tuesday, the Toronto hospital network said it had restored “virtually all” its digital systems, attributing the outage to internal issues, not an outside cyberattack.

The issues with the outage reported Monday were “entirely internal,” and there was no breach of patient data, a University Health Network (UHN) spokeswoman said.

Ontario’s Cybersecurity Expert Panel concluded in a September report that the broader public services sector needed more work to achieve “cyber maturity.”

With files from The Canadian Press